Recursive implicit rules without explicit intermediates?

[Luke Goodsell]

Hi,

Thanks in advance for taking the time to read and reply to my email.

$ make --version
GNU Make 4.0
Built for x86_64-pc-linux-gnu

Abstract:

I'm writing a template makefile for performing similar - but different - 
computational biology pipelines and am encountering an issue with recursive 
implicit rules. Please can you suggest a solution that doesn't require 
explicitly listing every intermediate target?

Background:

I'm writing a Makefile template that can be used for new projects. Each project 
follows a very similar, path but with differences that must be manually 
adapted. Each project has to perform similar tasks on each of number of 
different 'sections', each of which has a number of different 'groups' that 
each have a number of 'steps'. Each step cannot be run until the previous step 
has run. The same is true of groups and sections.

Problem:

The first group of the first section runs fine, with all steps running without 
error. However, the second group of the first section - and all subsequent 
targets - fails with:

make: *** No rule to make target '[TARGET]'.  Stop.

I understand that an implicit rule cannot be used multiple times within a 
chain, and that the standard solution is to explicitly declare an intermediate. 
However, since this makefile template may have tens each of steps, groups and 
sections, that would require hundreds to thousands of explicitly declared 
intermediates.

Is there a better solution I've overlooked?

Addendum:

A prototypical makefile that demonstrates the problem is pasted below.

Kind regards,
Luke


# Example makefile
# I want to be able to be able to `make all` without explicitly listing all
# intermediate steps. The first target that fails is
# section/section1/group2/step1/do_step

all: \
      section/section2/section_end \

      echo "$@";

section/section1/section_start: \

      echo "$@";

section/section2/section_start: \
      section/section1/section_end

      echo "$@";

# eg: section/section1/group1/group_start
section/%/group1/group_start: \

      echo "$@";

# eg: section/section1/group2/group_start
section/%/group2/group_start: \
      section/%/group1/group_end \

      echo "$@";

# eg: section/section1/group1/step1/do_step
# eg: section/section1/group2/step1/do_step
section/%/step1/do_step: \
      section/%/group_start \

      echo "$@";

# eg: section/section1/group1/step2/do_step
section/%/step2/do_step: \
      section/%/step1/do_step \

      echo "$@";

# eg: section/section1/group1/step3/do_step
section/%/step3/do_step: \
      section/%/step2/do_step \

      echo "$@";

# eg: section/section1/group1/group_end
section/%/group_end: \
      section/%/step3/do_step \

      echo "$@";

# eg: section/section1/section_end
section/%/section_end: \
      section/%/group2/group_end \

      echo "$@";